3 interesting take aways from this article for me: > By her twenties, Ms Rifkin, who did not finish high school, was earning six-figure pay. I've never heard

3 interesting take aways from this article for me: > By her twenties, Ms Rifkin, who did not finish high school, was earning six-figure pay. I've never heard anyone call pit trading a meritocracy but it was one job where people who didn't have the best pedigree could still get a very good paying job. As is pointed out every day there are fewer and fewer of these types of jobs around anymore in the North America. I think real estate agent and sales are the two jobs that immediately come to mind as jobs that people who don't have a university education can still make great money with. > Electronic futures trading arrived in 1992, when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched its Globex technology. Nymex followed a year later with Access, short for American Computerized Commodity Exchange System and Services. But access to Access was confined to hours when pits were closed, to protect the value of seats on the floor, Mr Collins says. Even when given an, IMHO, obviously superior technology the incumbents were able to hold it off for the better part of a decade. I always try to keep this in the back of my head when trying to predict curve jumping shifts in behaviour, just because you think something is superior to the incumbent you can't assume that it will immediately replace it. Or put another way its dangerous to short the incumbants on the thesis that new tech will immediately replace them, the old guard can be very sticky. > GEM’s 17th floor office off Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan contains just five traders on a recent afternoon, with a few more patched in by video feed from offices in Chicago and Dublin. The room is quiet but for the hum of the air conditioner, brokers quoting oil structures over speaker phones and the bleep of trades being executed, often driven by algorithms. > Mr Vonderheide’s employees studied physics, economics, chemistry and finance at top US universities > “A friend used to say, ‘If I weren’t trading gasoline, I’d be pumping it’. Well, some of them are.” These are the people who replaced the pit traders. If you contrast them, a successful pit trader tended to be loud, big, boisterous and outgoing. When a shift does happen as the shift from pit to computer did, the new guard tend not to resemble the old guard very much and the old guard tend not to fair very well.